REALITY BITES

About the Time Ethan Hawke Listened to a Bridal Party Bash His Aging Appearance

If you and a group of girls were criticizing Ethan Hawke’s appearance at a swanky Houston hotel back in 2004, first, how dare you. And second, the Boyhood actor heard your entire conversation.

As part of Variety’s “Actors on Actors” series, Hawke and Keira Knightley traded stories about receiving particularly harsh criticism in their career. While Knightley always seems to flip open to magazine pages containing a negative review of one of her films, Hawke, who is 15 years her senior, warned her that criticism will only get worse with time. “When people enjoy talking about how badly you’re aging,” the actor said, “that’s an interesting one.”

Hawke then unfurled a cautionary tale that seemed to center around his 2004 induction into the Texas Film Hall of Fame. “I got some kind of dubious award for the Texas filmmakers Hall of Fame,” Hawke began. After the ceremony ended, the actor said, “[So] I’m feeling pretty good about myself and I go to my hotel room in this posh hotel in Houston.” While walking through the lobby and hallway, he said, “I passed a bunch of young women . . . a bridesmaid party and they had seen [me] and maybe I had been a little rude passing through because I was in my head [thinking about my award]. I was just trying to get to my room.”

Once safely back inside his room and tucked into bed, however, the actor said that he started hearing snippets of a women’s conversation outside. “I was going to sleep [that night] and I overheard, ‘Yeah, I saw him. He looks so old!’”

“I’m lying in bed [wondering], ‘Who are they talking about?’” Cut to a girl saying, “And I liked him in Reality Bites!”

Unbeknownst to them, the bridal party continued to deflate Hawke’s post-award high with surgical precision. “They start talking about my teeth and then it went downhill from there,” he told Knightley. “They were right outside my door.”